This is why you can't fight yourself and win

The art of self-compassion – the ultimate life hack

Mar 27, 2024

Imagine you just did one of those things that you look back on afterwards and think, "why the hell did I do that?" Perhaps you binged on junk food, spent all your savings on clothes, drank too much, overshared, underperformed, or went blank in an important exam…How do you respond to the error after the fact?

The most common reaction is to automatically reach for self-discipline. Whether we punish ourselves, berate ourselves or call ourselves names, we understandably aim to correct the problem so we won't do it again.

Self-discipline paves the way to future failure

But here's the thing. When it comes to self-sabotage, beating yourself up doesn't solve future problems, but creates them, embedding the habit, compounding it and making it MORE likely to happen again.

This is because the things we call self-sabotage grow out of unmet needs and a disconnect with ourselves and our emotions. The sabotage itself is a cry for help, not necessarily for others to hear, but for ourselves to hear. And so beating ourselves up is literally the worst thing we could do.

You can't shame yourself into being better, because the part that's acting out is looking for love and attention. That part wants to be seen and heard — by you. So if you try to silence it, or beat it into submission, or hide it… it'll only ever need to shout louder. And this is why you simply cannot fight yourself and win.

Instead, you need to learn how to practice self-compassion.

Self-compassion

If this term feels horribly fluffy and woo-woo to you, bear with me, because in recent years there have been literally thousands of scientific papers written on self-compassion, which have shown this ability to be linked with positive mental health, decreased psychopathology, increased resilience, improved physical health, and much, much more.

Dr. Kristen Neff, who's an associate professor at the University of Texas and probably the biggest name in the world of this kind of research, breaks self-compassion down into three interconnected components.

1. Mindfulness

The first is mindfulness, as in an awareness of the pain you're experiencing as you experience it. I need to note that this doesn't necessarily need to be achieved through meditation. Here, we are simply talking about the ability to be mindful – to be aware of what's going on with you. Meditation can get you there, but so can journaling, therapy, using an app like Betwixt, of course, or just a healthy dollop of curiosity.

2. Self-kindness

The second component of self-compassion is self kindness. This means the ability to offer yourself the same kind of love, support, and kindness that you would extend to someone else – say, a friend in need.

How? Well, this can be done in a reflective journaling practice. A longitudinal study conducted in 2010 found that writing a self-compassionate letter to oneself once a day for five days not only decreased depression levels for 3 months but also increased happiness for 6 months after the study.

But you don't have to put pen to paper. You can practise self-kindness by talking to yourself, either in your head or out loud during any difficult moment. For example, you might simply swap "you stupid idiot" for "it's okay" after making a mistake at work. Or, you could set an alarm on your phone to remind you, once daily, to spend two minutes gently and kindly talking to yourself about whatever happened that day.

3. A sense of common humanity

And finally, you need to practice a sense of common humanity and connectedness, which is the third component of self-compassion, according to Neff. This, quite beautifully, means actively remembering that imperfection is a natural part of the human condition. It's something we all share and that brings us together rather than sets us apart. I think most of us know that intellectually, but the key is to train yourself to remember when you most need it.

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That's it. That's the simple – but not necessarily easy – answer to self-sabotage. In order to regain control in those moments when we feel most out of control, we need to drop the habit of self-punishment or self-discipline and reach for self-compassion instead:

Starting with mindfulness and holding our painful thoughts and feelings in balanced awareness rather than overidentifying with them.

Then, practising self-kindness, by extending kindness and understanding to ourselves rather than harsh judgment and self-criticism.

And finally, staying in touch with our sense of common humanity, by seeing our own experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than viewing them as separating, isolating, and therefore shameful.

It's by doing these things that we give the part of us that's acting out the thing that it most needs in order to let go of the self-sabotaging message it was sending. Self-compassion is how we make the denied, resisted parts of the self feel seen and heard.

Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.